The present invention relates to devices for chemical and/or electrical analysis of biological samples. More specifically, the present invention relates to superfusion apparatus for use in a receptor binding procedure and to devices for screening the quality of a binding to discriminate poor bindings from good bindings.
Various devices and procedures are currently utilized for receptor binding procedures, and it is presently possible to obtain data through the utilization of automatic techniques to indicate the binding of a radioactive ligand at a receptor site. While these devices can indicate the occurrence of a binding, they have heretofore been cumbersome and dependent upon the skill of the operator or technician to discriminate the quality of the binding achieved. The lack of a quality uniformity and the differences in chemical and electrical stimulation procedures renders it difficult to discriminate or screen good quality bindings from poor quality bindings, making it difficult to limit further testing to good quality bindings and to exclude poor quality bindings from further testing.
The manual perfusion techniques exist for qualitative analysis of biological samples, however, manual perfusion of multiple samples is both technically difficult and extremely time-consuming and even more dependent upon the skill of the laboratory researcher in determining the results of binding studies. This is particularly evident in the differences in procedures in chemical and electrical binding protocols.